Sin City Streets

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the last several years, the Colorado River basin is in the midst of the worst drought in at least a millenium and a half, and the water levels in Lake Mead have been dropping to record lows . There's speculation that the reservoir might soon reach "dead pool" , the point at which water can no longer flow out of the lake, and a lot of local residents are convinced that their taps will soon run dry. That leads me to write this post, busting some of the myths around the lake, the river, and the water that keeps our city alive. 1. Las Vegas is draining the Colorado dry Many people look at Las Vegas, sitting as close as we do to Lake Mead and depending almost exclusively on its waters, as the main culprit in the draining of the Colorado River. It makes sense: our city is known for extravagance, the fountains of the Bellagio being an iconic image of the Strip, and it's easy to see the water intakes in the lake itself and

 The RTC will be operating using its reduced, Saturday service schedule, starting last Monday and continuing until... who knows? This means that, while users in the core transit-served areas of the Valley will notice only mild reductions in frequency, riders on routes on the edges of the service area will see some pretty drastic cuts. Take, for example, the 121 Durango/Buffalo, running through the western suburbs: the weekday schedule has it as a standard half-hourly route, but on Saturdays it only runs hourly. If that's the bus you rely on, it's a significant cut, and it'll mean that it's that much harder for me to get to one of my doctors, just as an example. Why would the agency do this? Well, the same reason everything sucks in the world today, and the same reason I haven't posted in over two years: the coronavirus. Logistics companies are desperately trying to move all the stuff we've been ordering while we've been in lockdown, through a pandemic-strick

The RTC recently voted unanimously to deploy a Bus Rapid Transit route along Maryland Parkway, from downtown to McCarran, rather than install the Valley's first light rail route along the same corridor. While many public transit advocates and progressive political activists are lamenting the Commission's decision to keep buses rolling along the Parkway, they honestly shouldn't be-- or at least, not enough to distract them from pushing the RTC to design a high-quality transit system. As author and transit consultant Jarrett Walker notes on his blog Human Transit , most of t he cultural preference for trains over buses is just that-- cultural. What really matters for the reliability of a transit service is not the underlying technology but the priority given to it by planners . Does the line stop frequently or only at important locations? Does it have its own, dedicated space to travel, like a tunnel or elevated track? Or does it have its own lane, but have to stop at cros

Title basically. If you've visited Las Vegas, you probably know about the Deuce, the charming double-deckers that slowly wend their way from casino to casino along the Strip, and you might know about the SDX, which does what the Deuce does but faster (and in its own lane-- after it leaves the area with the heaviest traffic congestion). I strongly doubt you know about the Boulder Highway Express and Sahara Express, two rapid routes with signal priority, level boarding, and dedicated lanes, and I guarantee you don't know that similar features are present on routes 202 Flamingo and 113 N. Vegas as well. Huge swathes of the Las Vegas Valley are served by frequent, reliable busways, but it's hard to know that without actually riding the system. As the ever-excellent Human Transit points out , right-of-way and stop spacing are the two most important factors for reliable transit. Five routes in the Las Vegas Valley have Class B rights-of-way, dedicated lanes just for buses and

Hello, world! It's Allie again. I* ran a transportation blog for nearly six years in my old city, and I wasn't going to start a new one here in the big, bad desert, I wasn't. Surely somebody out here was talking about urbanism and transit issues in America's 29th-largest city! Surely that was a job that I didn't want or need to do, what with finishing a dissertation, teaching at a new campus, and just generally getting settled in a new city for the first time since I left high school. But no! There is nobody in Las Vegas-- at least that's Googleable-- who is writing about urbanism and alternative transportation issues. Nobody. I wasn't going to let that get me started either, nope. But dear readers, I am falling in love with a new city and I have things to say about her! My personal social media audience isn't going to go for this kind of geekery, and the general consensus on Las Vegas in urbanist circles is pretty much set: it's an irresponsible